Truthdig
Where Is the Outrage Over Anti-Immigrant Bills?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_is_the_outrage_over_anti-immigrant
_bills_20170707/
Posted on Jul 7, 2017
By Sonali Kolhatkar
A demonstrator participates in a May Day protest outside the White House
to denounce President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies. (Andrew Harnik
/ AP
(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/May-Day-Protest/e539baa076b34c898bb4
ca7d1cfed299/1/0) )
While many of us are rightfully angry over Donald Trump's treatment of the
media, over the GOP's attempt to gut health care for millions of Americans
and over myriad other issues, two little-noticed but impactful bills sailed
through the House of Representatives last week with barely a peep from
progressive voices. The bills were the first immigration-related pieces of
legislation taken up by the House since Trump's inauguration and apply harsh
penalties for undocumented people. They also help the president live up to
some of his most xenophobic rhetoric and were passed with little or no
debate, even receiving some Democratic support. They now head to the Senate,
and unless there is a major public outcry, the bills could become law and
fuel the hateful promises Trump made to the racist elements in his base.
Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center
(http://www.immigrantjustice.org/) , explained to me in an interview
(http://www.risingupwithsonali.com/house-swiftly-passes-two-deeply-anti-immi
grant-bills/) that "we saw the same sort of procedural shenanigans
happening with the health care act." She added that when it came to the
immigration bills, there was hardly any outrage from either Democrats or the
public. "These bills were introduced, and then they were rushed to the floor
of the House, and so that stripped us of the opportunity to weigh in in a
meaningful way," she said.
One of the two bills is named Kate's Law, after Kathryn Steinle
(http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-immigration-sanctuary-kathryn
-steinle-20150723-htmlstory.html) , a young, telegenic, white American woman
who was killed in San Francisco in 2015 after a bullet fired from a stolen
gun ricocheted off the sidewalk and struck her in the back. The man accused
of shooting the gun, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, happened to be
undocumented-a factor that gave candidate Trump just the fodder he was
looking for to target "sanctuary cities"
(http://sfgov.org/oceia/sanctuary-city-ordinance-0) like San Francisco and
scapegoat immigrants as violent criminals. Yes, Lopez-Sanchez had been
convicted of multiple felonies on narcotics-related charges (rather than
violent crimes), but apparently it did not matter that the bullet that
tragically ended Steinle's life was an accidental ricochet off the sidewalk.
According to The Los Angeles Times:
Lopez-Sanchez told KGO-TV that he found a gun wrapped in a T-shirt on the
ground near a bench that evening and that it accidentally fired three times
when he touched it. He said he kicked the gun off the pier and walked away,
unaware anyone had been shot.
Had the fatal shot been fired by a citizen, there would have been no attempt
to make a martyr of Steinle and politicize her death. Indeed, a judge
dismissed Steinle's parents' suit against the city of San Francisco for
being a "sanctuary city," but allowed their case against
(http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/09/kate-steinle-case-familys-suit-over-s
tolen-federal-gun-will-go-forward/) the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to
go forward, given that the gun in question was left unsecured by a BLM
federal officer in an unattended car.
Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims of mass violence by
immigrants in the U.S. Last October, just days before the election, he said
at a rally in Springfield, Ohio, that "[t]housands of Americans have been
killed by illegal immigrants," leaving out context, time period and more. He
might as well have said, "Thousands of Americans have been killed by
toddlers," which would be just as true. As McClatchy pointed out
(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article1108451
17.html) , a case Trump often cited last year was that of a legal refugee
from Vietnam who had shot a police officer in California 26 years earlier.
That officer later died-of cancer-12 years after the incident. If Trump can
point only to cases such as this and to the accidental shooting of Steinle,
then his claims of violence from undocumented immigrants are deceptive at
best and blatantly xenophobic at worst.
Referring to Steinle's death, Altman said, "That case and a few others are
being used in a way that I find very manipulative of the victims, to put
forward an anti-immigrant agenda." That agenda is clear: to enlist local
police in federal immigration enforcement activities and engage in mass
detention and deportation. Already under Trump, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agents are targeting sanctuary cities
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/23/politics/sanctuary-city-ice-raids/index.html)
, as revealed earlier this year to CNN by an anonymous immigration official.
According to the news report, "High-ranking ICE officials have discussed in
internal meetings carrying out more raids on those locations," and "a
mid-February raid in the Austin metro area was done in retaliation for a
local sheriff's recent decision to limit her department's cooperation with
ICE."
While Kate's Law primarily enhances sentencing for multiple violations of
immigration law, it ranges beyond that point. Altman cited another of the
bill's many provisions: "Anyone can be punished for up to 10 years in a
federal prison for illegal entry if they have three prior misdemeanor
convictions." But, she explained, "there's no statute of limitations," and
"those three misdemeanors could be offenses that are attendant to a person's
immigration status." That means that an undocumented immigrant who has never
committed a violent crime but has been cited three times for driving without
a license in states where it is illegal to procure one could face 10 years
in federal prison. What's more, by refusing to let undocumented immigrants
obtain driver's licenses, states also jeopardize public safety. A study
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/drivers-license-undocumented-immigrants
-california-safer_us_58e3d326e4b03a26a366adf5) found that California's
decision to allow driver's licenses for immigrants resulted in a significant
drop in hit-and-run accidents.
The second bill the House passed complements Kate's Law by expanding the
definition of federal funds that cities using the label "sanctuary" could
lose. The "No Sanctuary for Criminals" bill has been deemed unconstitutional
by the ACLU
(https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-statement-house-immigration-bills) and
other groups, as it appears to violate the Fourth and Tenth amendments
(https://thinkprogress.org/anti-immigrant-bills-trump-house-c28621e30220) .
But the bill goes even further, adding conditions that would affect would-be
recipients of city funding. Altman explained that the bill "expands vastly
the number of people that would be put into immigration jails and held there
without any opportunity to have an individualized determination of whether
it is proper for them to be detained." In other words, it will contribute to
the already disproportionate numbers of people, especially people of color,
being incarcerated in the U.S. without due process or probable cause.
What Trump and the GOP fail to mention is that cooperation with federal
agents makes all residents of the U.S. less safe. Altman said, "If you have
a local jail that is regularly handing people over to ICE, then immigrants
and their loved ones are not going to call 9-1-1. They're not going to
testify when they have been a witness to a crime." Her logic is not
hypothetical. Already there are drops in crime reporting
(http://www.newsweek.com/trump-latinos-are-reluctant-report-crime-616253)
coming from immigrant-heavy communities. This is bad for public safety
overall, and we have Trump and the Republicans to thank for it.
But neither Democrats nor many progressives in the party's base seem to care
very much about these two immigration bills. A report in The Hill
(http://thehill.com/latino/340576-immigration-battle-shifts-to-senate-testin
g-dems) explained why 24 House Democrats voted for the bills-because "House
Democratic leaders said they wouldn't twist arms to get their members to
oppose the legislation." Unlike the discipline Democrats have shown on
preserving the Affordable Care Act against Republican assault, the more
liberal party seems willing to throw immigrant communities under the bus.
Outside of immigrant rights organizations and civil rights groups, there has
been little protest from major social justice groups. "It's really
disappointing," Altman said of the lack of attention from liberals and
progressives.
"This legislation goes hand-in-hand with a coordinated effort by the
administration to paint all immigrants as criminal just by nature of their
immigration status," Altman said, "and that allows this administration to
normalize their goal of mass detention and deportation of immigrants."
The two anti-immigrant bills now head to the Senate, where at least three
Democrats-West Virginia's Joe Manchin III, North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp and
Indiana's Joe Donnelly-may join Republicans
(http://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/murky-future-senate-house-passed-immigr
ation-bills) to pass them. The only thing standing in the way of a
potentially bipartisan push to scapegoat immigrants is grass-roots pressure.
Activists have successfully pushed back on many of Trump's dangerous goals,
and it is incumbent on the broad anti-Trump resistance movement to rally for
the rights of immigrants, arguably the most vulnerable targets in the U.S.
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